Welcome to the STAGES Industry Series, where people in theatre - artists, presenters, producers, funders, and supporters - come together to make things happen. Our goal is simple: connect people, encourage collaboration, and share visions for the future. We want to make theatre better by working together.
THE WORK OF GATHERING
This year’s Industry Series is guided by the pressing question: How do artists gather now, and what do we need from each other?
Artists are still being asked to do too much with too little. They are expected to do the work, build relationships, secure funding, manage touring, and sustain a practice within systems that remain fragile, competitive, and uneven. Industry events can reproduce these same pressures, rewarding readiness, polish, and access while leaving less room for reflection, uncertainty, or other ways of being together.
Rather than smoothing over that tension, we want the Industry Series at STAGES to make room for it.
Across talks, pitch sessions, walks, shared meals, demos, roundtables, field trips, and late-night salons, we will ask how work is seen, supported, and shared, and what conditions make that possible in the first place. What does meaningful support look like in practice? Who carries the burdens of development and touring? What happens when artists are expected to build futures in a province where space, funding, and capacity feel increasingly constrained? And what shifts when gathering itself is understood as part of the work?
This is not only a space for opportunity. It is a space for conversation, challenge, hospitality, and exchange — a place to test ideas, question assumptions, build relationships, and reflect more seriously on the structures shaping artistic life.
If the old story tells artists to work harder and network better, Industry at STAGES asks what it might mean to build something else.
Welcome to the conversation.
HOW TO BE HERE
Industry at STAGES is built around conversation, exchange, and shared time. Some sessions are public, some are invited, and some ask for active participation. You do not need to arrive with a pitch or a plan. Come ready to listen, meet people, and spend time with ideas in process.
2026 PITCH ROOM:
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Pitch Room is a curated live encounter between artists and invited industry guests. Selected artists share projects in development and enter into conversation about what the work is becoming, what it needs, and what kinds of support, partnership, or future life might emerge around it.
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Part presentation, part dialogue, Pitch Room is designed less as a sales exercise than as a space for exchange, context, and relationship-building.
Deadline to submit is Friday, May 22nd
Selected artists will be contacted by Tuesday, May 26th
Have a question or need assistance?
Please contact industry@easternfronttheatre.com
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THURSDAY
This is a private pre-series session where invited funders, presenters, and artists will come together to discuss the structures that shape artistic life.
Funders' Working Group
3:00 – 5:00 PM
By starting the series with this working group on Thursday, we hope to encourage open conversations about support, access, and responsibility. Join funder representatives from Arts Nova Scotia and the Province of Nova Scotia for this conversation. How are artists expected to handle development, touring, and risk? Where do current systems fall short? What would it look like to create sustainable conditions that do not require artists to do more with fewer resources? How can artists and funders advocate for this and each other?
FRIDAY
Friday is about arrival. We arrive at the festival, step into the room, and begin to understand what kind of gathering we are making together.
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Before the weekend turns toward pitches, demos, field trips, and working sessions, we start by gathering. We meet the cohort, recognize where we are, and open the space together. It is a chance to get oriented, to see who is here, and to begin creating the conditions for conversation, exchange, and support over the days ahead.
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The evening moves from welcome and introductions into performance, keeping art at the heart of the gathering. Later, the Artist Salon offers a relaxed place to meet, reconnect, and keep the conversation going.
​Welcome Event:
Registration + Mingle
5:00 – 5:30 PM
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A chance to settle in, pick up your pass, and ease into the weekend. This opening half-hour is designed to help participants arrive, get oriented, and begin stepping into the festival's shared space.
Networking Session:
Cohort Introductions
5:30 – 6:00 PM
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Meet this year’s invited artists, presenters, producers, and guests. Through brief introductions, participants share who they are, what they do, and the conversations or connections they hope to have over the weekend.
Suggested Festival Programming:
SHORTCUTS
6:30 – 7:15 PM
Creating a compendium of alternative routes.
Shortcuts are little acts of defiance. Despite what route we are told we should follow, we use shortcuts to find our own way.
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In this piece, audience members’ favourite shortcuts are collected, processed, illustrated, published, and distributed by a trio of workers who open up the inside of their factory to us so we can see every detail of this long process to take a short cut.
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*FREE FESTIVAL PROGRAMMING.
Suggested Festival Programming: 2021
7:30 – 9:30 PM
Under the glow of a flickering screen, a daughter reconstructs her deceased father—pixel by pixel, contradiction by contradiction.
2021 is a live performance where theatre, AI, and video-game storytelling converge, blurring the boundary between human remembrance and machine logic. An audience member steps into the role of Brian, an unhoused veteran reliving his final weeks inside a looping digital hospital: a labyrinth of corridors, bureaucratic dead ends, and fleeting human contact. Guided by his daughter’s narration, fragments of data become playable memory. Each decision glitches reality a little more.
How do we provide dignity in death to those we fundamentally disagree with? Part elegy, part experiment, 2021 exposes the tenderness and terror of digital resurrection. It asks not whether machines can think, but whether memory itself is a kind of simulation.
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*INDUSTRY SERIES PASSHOLDERS CAN PURCHASE $5 TICKETS TO REGULAR FESTIVAL PROGRAMMING.
SATURDAY
The day is filled with conversation, presentations, reflection, and informal exchanges. Through keynotes, pitches, walks, meals, performances, and late-night talks, we explore how artists are supported, how relationships form, and what structures we create or rethink when we come together.
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There is both ambition and pressure here, and Saturday makes space for each. The day allows for visibility and vulnerability, for sharing in public and connecting quietly. It also invites us to consider important questions: who is noticed, how support is given, and what artistic futures seem possible.
Hot Takes and Hot Cakes:
A Breakfast for Complaints
9:00 – 9:45 AM
A structured morning session for airing frustrations, naming pressure points, and getting a few things off our chests before the weekend moves on. Hot Cakes and Hot Takes invites artists and guests to share the hot takes, recurring complaints, and difficult truths that are often sitting just below the surface of conversations about artistic life.
Using a playful format built around paper pancakes and short provocations, the session is designed to be brief, social, and honest: a way to acknowledge what is difficult without getting stuck there, and to clear space for the rest of the weekend’s conversations.
Featured Session:
Pitch Room
10:00 – 11:30 AM
Pitch Room is a curated live encounter between artists and invited industry guests. Selected artists share projects in development and enter into conversation about what the work is becoming, what it needs, and what kinds of support, partnership, or future life might emerge around it.
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Part presentation, part dialogue, Pitch Room is designed less as a sales exercise than as a space for exchange, context, and relationship-building.
Please note: Pitch Room is a curated session and does not accept open submissions.
Networking Session:
Artist Walk & Talk
1:00 – 2:30 PM
This is a softer way to network, with time for walking and reflection. Led by a local artist, participants are invited to slow down, connect through movement, and spend time together in a different way.
Suggested Festival Programming: MASS FOR-SHUTOUTS
3:00 - 4:30 PM
Mass for Shut-Outs is a multidisciplinary performance that plays with the shape of a Catholic mass to ask new questions, challenge old stories, and dismantle the gatekeepers’ fortress. Written and performed by Tanya Davis, with musical support from Carlie Howell, Mass for Shut-Outs is a rousing and poetic take on Sunday service, with orature, music, and opportunities for play and communion. It features verse dressed as prayer, monologue mimicking homily, joyful singalong, and sombre reflection. It is designed for those of us on the spiritual fringes, who also seek meaning and connection, even while being historically shut out of—or disinterested in—traditional communities of faith, their liturgy, and their institutions. Mass for Shut-Outs is a shout out to anyone grappling with the complexity of faith, the inconsistency of awe, and the politics of organized religion. It is for atheists seeking connection, agnostics asking questions, and believers kindly curious about other people’s gods.
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*INDUSTRY SERIES PASSHOLDERS CAN PURCHASE $5 TICKETS TO REGULAR FESTIVAL PROGRAMMING.
Networking Session:
Industry Eats
5:00 – 6:30 PM
A shared meal designed for conversation and connection. Industry Eats gives artists, guests, and festival participants a chance to meet informally and keep building relationships outside the formal sessions.
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Sign up for a seat!
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NOTE: Food and beverage NOT provided.
Suggested Festival Programming:
PLAY
6:30 - 7:30 PM
Multifaceted artist Jacinte Armstrong brings together an interdisciplinary cast to put into play a communal and joyful building of a work. Beginning from the idea that dance is in all of us, PLAY explores how objects around us choreograph the movement in our everyday lives. Using movement, drawings, music, and colorful large-scale objects, the performers invite the audience to take part in the creative flow. Audiences can choose to join in to experience moving and performing with the artists, or just sit back and enjoy the time and space, letting this whimsical piece draw them into the moment.​
Suggested Festival Programming: EPIDERMIS CIRCUS
8:00 - 9:30 PM
This beautifully twisted variety show is performed by Ingrid Hansen, who also puppeteers for the Jim Henson Company’s Fraggle Rock and for Sesame Workshop. Watch behind-the-scenes as SNAFU creates a live puppet film, animating cheeky vignettes in the palm of her hand and projecting them onto a huge screen.
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*INDUSTRY SERIES PASSHOLDERS CAN PURCHASE $5 TICKETS TO REGULAR FESTIVAL PROGRAMMING.
SUNDAY
Sunday is all about movement, exchange, and reflection. Unlike Saturday’s structured sessions, the last day invites everyone to travel together, gather informally, and have deeper conversations. It’s a chance to see what happens when artists and guests spend relaxed time together, and how ideas keep growing through new experiences and discussions.
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Sunday includes a field trip, an open lunch, a working session for producers, and the final Festival Salon. The day encourages curiosity, practical ideas, and group reflection. It’s a time to look back on what we’ve shared, build stronger connections, and think about what we’ll take with us after the weekend.
Rotunda
Roundup
9:00 – 9:45 AM
This short morning gathering helps everyone reconnect, get oriented, and see what’s coming up for the day. Rotunda Roundup is a relaxed way to start before heading out together.
FIELD TRIP
Group Travel
10:30 – 11:30 AM
The field trip is a group outing that changes the setting and encourages conversation, observation, and sharing while on the move. It invites everyone to spend time together outside the theatre and think about how place, travel, and shared experiences shape artistic conversations.
FIELD TRIP
Open Lunch
11:30 – 1:00 PM
Open Lunch is a shared midday break for eating, chatting, and spending time together after the field trip. It gives everyone a relaxed space to keep talking, connect with others, and let ideas settle before the afternoon session. This is also a good time to recognize the work that supports us, talk about what has mattered, and remind each other why our work is important.
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NOTE: The Field Trip lunch and locations may be secret, but all dietary considerations will be confirmed in advance.
FIELD TRIP
Working Session: Producer’s Roundtable
1:30 - 3:30 PM
Join us for a focused conversation designed for producers and anyone curious about how artistic work is supported, developed, and sustained. This roundtable is a chance to share practical ideas, ask questions, and discuss the challenges and opportunities of producing today. On the final day of the Industry Series, we’ll look at how support is organized, where the pressures are, and what it takes to create real conditions for artists and projects to grow.
FIELD TRIP
Sit + Sport Social
3:30 - 4:30 PM
Enjoy some loosely structured play, enjoy a tasty treat, or take a load off with a beverage for the last hour of our Field Trip.
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Festival Salon:
Closing Awards + Reflections
5:30 - 7:00 PM
A playful closing ceremony recognizing moments of generosity, insight, care, humour, and connection from across the weekend. Participants will be invited to offer informal awards and reflections before we transition into Tanya Davis’ festival documentarian performance.
Festival Closing Event:
Chaos Karaoke
7:00 - 8:30 PM
Karaoke is the last informal gathering to end the weekend with some fun, joy, and shared energy. It’s a relaxed way to come together outside the festival's more structured parts.
2026 CREATIVE COHORT
This year, we’re shifting the conversation about who holds power in the creative ecosystem and how work moves through it. At its core, many independent artists come to industry events with one goal: to get their work booked. But in a fragile touring landscape, where opportunities are scarce and selection processes remain opaque, we need to ask harder questions.
These industry professionals are active collaborators, advocates, and problem-solvers. Some of these conversations may lead to touring, but this series is also about creating lasting relationships, exploring alternative models, and making space for new ways of supporting artistic work. Throughout the Industry Series, this cohort listens, responds, and engages in critical conversations about sustainability and access. Their role is to champion transparency, challenge outdated assumptions, and push for more equitable models of artistic exchange.
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​By bringing together a diverse cohort spanning disciplines, scales, and geographies, we are fostering connections that move beyond transactional pitching toward collaborative, artist-driven touring models.
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iara Solano Arana
Artist & Festival Director (Spain)
iara Solano Arana is an artist and researcher. She creates scenic experiences and relational devices that cross disciplines and place the spectator as the primary subject of her pieces, exploring the gradient margins between theater, film, dance, and installation. She combines her practice, in which perception, liminality, and the body are central concepts, with cultural mediation and management, as well as teaching and mentoring, and accompanying the projects of other artists. Her works have been programmed at festivals, museums and theaters on four continents, including The Barbican in London or Sidney’s International Festival, and she has received multiple international awards for her work as a creator, performer, and manager. Since 2022 she has developed Object Permanence, a theoretical-practical transdisciplinary investigation into culture and perception that delves into an anthropology of the senses and notions of accessible experiential dance, which crystallizes in projects of rewriting, adaptation and choreographic creation for blind audiences, such as the series Towards an Invisible Dance or the performative conference Reflex Acts. She is currently the artistic director of FIAR, International Festival of Relational Art.
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Robin Deacon
SPILL (UK)
Robin Deacon is a British artist, writer, educator and curator. He is currently Artistic Director of SPILL, an arts organisation based in Ipswich, Suffolk, UK. SPILL champions the experimental and accessible in art and culture, with the aim of bridging mainstream and marginal practices. Along with a renowned residency and artist development programme, a strong focus on placemaking, participation and social practice informs SPILL's projects. Robin is also Chair of Trustees for the Live Art Development Agency, a seminal arts organisation supporting and advocating for experimental arts practice in the UK and beyond. Between 2011 and 2021 he was Professor and Chair of Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA. As an artist, his work has been shown at Tate Britain and the Barbican (UK), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and as part of Performa in collaboration with the Whitney Museum, New York, USA. He has received awards and fellowships from organisations such as Arts Council England, The British Council, Delfina Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts and Franklin Furnace Inc. He is also a MacDowell Fellow.
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Liam Karry
Single Thread Theatre / Kick & Push Festival / Kingston Theatre Alliance (ON)
Liam (he/him) is the founding and current Artistic Director of Single Thread Theatre Company. He is a founding member and the Artistic Producer of the Kick & Push Festival as well as the Kingston Theatre Alliance. He currently serves on the boards of anARC theatre, Regional Tourism Ontario 9, as well as the Arts & Heritage Advisory Committee for the City of Kingston. Recent Production Credits include, PXR2026 and the Kick & Push 2026. Recent directing credits include: Unless, a site specific immersive experience produced in Bangkok, Thailand, and Collider, a live VR performance, which was co-produced by FOLDA and the rEvolver Festival.
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Gillian Jane Lees
Take Me Somewhere Festival (Scotland)
Gillian is a choreographer and performance practitioner. She makes rigorous attempts to build and control her environment over hours, and sometimes days, by undertaking physically demanding and mentally exhausting durational performances. Gillian’s interest lies in the fleeting moment where her will to succeed meets her diminishing physical ability to complete each task.
Gillian often collaborates with Adam York Gregory. Adam is a visual artist, writer and film-maker. He's particularly interested in the connections between seemingly disparate subjects and how meaning can be found through exploration.
Together, they are artists, writers and filmmakers, often making a form of durational sculpture. Their practice seeks to explore the notion of ‘the imagined ideal’ through subjective performance, objective experimentation, documentation and observation.
Frequently, their work is concerned with materiality, repetition and failure.
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​https://takemesomewhere.co.uk/
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Gillian Lees’s participation in STAGES is part of the ongoing exchange with Take Me Somewhere in Glasgow, Scotland, developed through the Nova Scotia trade mission led by artists Alex McLean and Dustin Harvey.
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Sean Guist
Intrepid Theatre (BC)
Sean Guist is the Artistic Director of Intrepid Theatre in Victoria, BC/Lekwungen Territory, he has worked there for over a decade in various marketing, fundraising and curatorial roles. Administrator by day and queer artist, producer and director by night, Sean holds a BFA in performance and an MFA in directing. He is the founding Curator of Intrepid Theatre’s OUTstages queer theatre festival, and has created new residency programs for local artists, and fostered new work through cabarets, emerging artist programs, and mentorship opportunities. Guist is the co-creator and director of The Book of My Shames, a new queer opera composed and performed by Isaiah Bell, that has played at Tapestry Opera, Opera Kelowna and UNO Fest, with the Regina Symphony, recently he commissioned, directed and dramaturged the newest show from author and performer Ivan Coyote, Playlist, that is now touring the country. Sean can be seen on drag stages as the bearded queen, Woofie, and has created and produced queer events in non-traditional queer spaces from breweries to cocktail bars to parking lots. He has served on the boards of Pacific Opera Victoria and indie dance company Broken Rhythms, and in 2024 was invited as an international panelist to The Genderhouse Festival in Aarhus, Denmark.
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Nicolette Kretz
auawirleben Theaterfestival Bern (Switzerland)
I've been the artistic and gernal director of auawirleben Theaterfestival Bern for 12 years now. It's an anual international performing arts festival taking place in various venues across the city over 12 days. Its programme runs under an anual theme (this year: "nonetheless") and includes a broad spectrum of performing arts forms and a late-night programme at the Festival Centre.
I occasionally also work as a writer or dramaturg and I run a pottery studio.
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INDUSTRY SERIES
CO-PRODUCERS
Dustin Harvey
I create new ways of being together while shedding light on how we’ve grown apart. My work blends theatre, film, immersive technology, and participatory art, inviting audiences into unexpected roles through interactive performance, virtual reality, and site-specific encounters. Over the years, I have invited people to slow-dance with strangers in disused storefronts, confess secrets to scene partners thousands of kilometres away, and engage with passersby on busy city streets from Aarhus, Denmark, to Guanajuato, Mexico.
My projects have been presented internationally at festivals and exhibitions, including SXSW, IDFA DocLab, MIT, GIFT, GIFF, RIFF, BelfastXR, LÓKAL, A! Festival, Cork Midsummer Festival, EXPERIMENTICA, High Performance Rodeo, SummerWorks, Forest Fringe, OFFTA, PuShOFF, Usine C, and the Aarhus Festival. I was selected for the UK–Canada Immersive Exchange, a CFC / StoryFutures UK initiative, and for Film 5, AFCOOP’s talent development program for emerging filmmakers. My project AWAKE & STILL DROWNING won Best Immersive Experience / Production at the 2025 Guanajuato International Film Festival in Mexico.
Richie Wilcox
Richie Wilcox is a multi-talented director/actor/writer who has spent the last fifteen years creating, devising and writing original works. They are the founding artistic director of HEIST where they have helped create and tour several acclaimed works including The Princess Show, Frequencies, Princess Rules, and New Waterford Boy. Wilcox has worked with numerous companies across the Maritimes including Neptune, Festival Antigonish, 2B Theatre, Kazan Co-Op, Opera Nova Scotia, the Highland Arts Theatre and more. Wilcox was Artistic Associate with Theatre Outre in Lethbridge, Alberta from 2012 - 2016 where they premiered acclaimed works including UNSEX’d and The Confessions of Jeffrey Dahmer. From 2019-2022 Wilcox served as the artistic director of Ship’s Company Theatre where they premiered award-winning original productions such as Good Grief and Dayboil. Wilcox is a Merritt-award winner in acting and playwriting as well as a past Mayor’s Award for Emerging Theatre Artist recipient. They were also a finalist for the 2021 Nova Scotia Masterwork award for their work on The Princess Show. Most recently, Wilcox directed the acclaimed production of Casey & Diana at Neptune Theatre.
FESTIVAL FUNDERS
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FESTIVAL SUPPORTERS
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